https://www.cityofsmoke.com New York in History and Anecdote Sat, 26 Dec 2015 02:33:29 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.2 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/595 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/595#respond Tue, 24 Mar 2015 22:18:22 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=595 Foggy or clear, twenty-four hours a day the ferries toot their diesel horns once as they depart the ferry slips at St. George on their five-mile voyage for Whitehall. The old names remain. Ferrymen are traditionalists. Sailing ferries were traveling the Upper Bay before the War of 1812, long before the five-borough City of New York was even a dream. Hence Whitehall and St. George, rather than Manhattan and Staten Island. ]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/595/feed 0 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1352 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1352#comments Mon, 09 Feb 2015 22:36:44 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1352 Among the stories recently published in the dailies about past transit strikes, I saw none about the brief strike by motor-men employed by the privately owned Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (BRT) in November 1918. It led directly to the Malbone Street wreck, in which a strikebreaker lost control]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1352/feed 2 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1195 Sun, 08 Feb 2015 03:00:31 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1195 Acommercial for the last season of Sex and the City showed Sarah Jessica Parker doing an elegant balancing act in stilettos along old steel rails set in a Brooklyn cobblestone street. I recognized the location: I had been there myself. Around 1994, attending to business down in the old]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1075 Sat, 07 Feb 2015 01:03:42 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1075 Continue reading "Sheridan’s Ride"]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/868 Tue, 03 Feb 2015 21:40:33 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=868 Occasionally, we think about investments we  could have made that might have made us rich. Armed with clairvoyance, who would not have sunk the farm into Microsoft, back when Bill Gates was a nebbish? But we probably would have put our money into AT&T, U.S. Steel or Western]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/803 Tue, 03 Feb 2015 02:14:40 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=803 Walter Francis O'Malley is infamous because he moved the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1957. Thirty-six years later, Wilfred Sheed dedicated My Life as a Fan not to, but against, "the villainous Walter O'Malley." According to Peter Golenbock's Bums, one man claimed the best news he]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/579 Sat, 31 Jan 2015 20:26:19 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=579 Phoebe Snow started here. I mean the train, not the singer--although she started here too, come to think of it. Born in New York City, she borrowed her stage name from the premiere express train of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad, "The Route of Phoebe Snow," "The Road of Anthracite," which passengers boarded by taking a ferry boat from the railroad's lower West Side ferry terminal to the massive Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken, New Jersey.]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1370 Tue, 10 Feb 2009 02:32:42 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1370 We must not forget how undistinguished the World Trade Center was. "When completed," the authors of the 2000 edition of the AIA Guide to New York City wrote, "these stolid, banal monoliths came to overshadow Lower Manhattan's cluster of filigreed towers, which had previously been the romantic evocation]]>